Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  Alvarez turned to her.

  “Are you settling in?”

  “So far,” Dagmar said, “it’s been enlightening.”

  Dagmar left Lincoln with Squadron Leader Alvarez and returned to the ops room, where her heart gave a leap as she saw Tuna Saltik standing on one of the office chairs, pinning to the wall an enormous poster of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Her heart jumped again as she recognized Ismet standing next to him, helping him hold the poster straight. There was another with them, a man with shockingly bright blond hair. All three wore summerweight coats and ties.

  She ran up to Ismet and gave him a hug from behind. He stiffened in surprise, then turned around. His eyes widened with pleasure, and then he hugged her and kissed both her cheeks.

  “Lovely to see you!” he said.

  “How’s your granny?” Dagmar asked.

  “Much better, thank you. Back in her home.”

  “You mean her tent?”

  Tuna grinned down at Dagmar from under his arm as he held out the poster.

  “Good to see you!” he said. “I’ll hug you later.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  Ismet offered a hand. “I’m Estragon, by the way.”

  Dagmar took the hand. “Briana.”

  “I’m Vladimir!” called Tuna from somewhere in his own armpit.

  Vladimir and Estragon, Dagmar thought. Right.

  “You’re showing off your college education,” Dagmar said.

  Ismet flushed slightly. “Maybe,” he said. He nodded at the man with surfer blond hair.

  “This is Rafet.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Rafet and Dagmar shook hands.

  “Rafet,” said Ismet, smiling, “is a dervish.”

  Dagmar turned to Rafet.

  “Do you whirl?”

  He smiled with brilliant white teeth.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not in the Mevlani organization. I follow Hacı Babur Khan.”

  Dagmar’s question had been facetious—she had thought Ismet was joking when he said Rafet was a dervish. But now Dagmar began to think that Rafet really was a dervish, whatever being a dervish meant in the modern world.

  She decided to make the next question a bland one.

  “Where did you learn your English?”

  “My dervish lodge is in the U.S. In Niagara Falls.”

  “Ah,” Dagmar said, uncertain how to respond to this without demonstrating her own abysmal ignorance.

  “Rafet,” said Ismet helpfully, “represents the Tek Organization.”

  Dagmar decided not to ask any more questions and instead to quietly, privately wiki everything as soon as she could.

  Tuna jumped down off the chair and gave Dagmar a one-armed hug while his other arm gestured at Atatürk.

  “Is the picture straight?”

  Dagmar looked up and received the poster’s full impact. The picture was based on an old photograph, but somewhere down the line the photograph had been hand-colored in eerie pastels, and the result was nothing short of terrifying. Larger than life-sized, the Father of the Nation wore a fur Cossack hat and a civilian tailcoat with a standing collar and tie. He scowled down from the wall, his unnaturally pink cheeks a startling contrast to his uncanny blue eyes.

  The look in the eyes sent a shudder up Dagmar’s spine.

  In her time in Turkey, Dagmar had seen a great many pictures of Atatürk. Most businesses had a photo displayed somewhere, and Atatürk busts and statues were common in Turkish towns and public buildings.

  What had surprised her was the variety of Atatürks on display. There was no standard representation. There were benign Atatürks, dignified Atatürks, and amused Atatürks that emphasized the impish upward tilt of his eyebrows. There were Atatürks with mustaches and Atatürks without mustaches. There were dapper Atatürks wearing tails and carrying a top hat, statesmanlike Atatürks standing amid a group of ministers and comrades, commanding Atatürks in military uniform.

  And then there were the scary Atatürks, a surprising number of them. This one, with his glaring eyes and upswept eyebrows, looked absolutely diabolical. He looked like the villain in a bad fantasy film. Below the image, in a blue typeface that matched the Gazi’s eyes, were the words Biz bize benzeriz.

  Something in Dagmar shrank from having this frightening icon gazing down at her for the length of the operation.

  “The picture looks straight enough,” Dagmar said. She pointed at the letters. “What does it say?”

  Ismet answered. “It says: ‘We are like ourselves.’ ”

  Dagmar looked around the room, at the piles of cardboard boxes, at Helmuth and Richard and Judy all laboring under Atatürk’s iron gaze.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s true enough.”

  What she actually wanted to say was, Are you sure you want this Atatürk? But she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak the words aloud.

  The cult of Atatürk was something Dagmar understood only in part. The United States of America had many founders: Franklin, Washington, the Adams cousins, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, and even people such as Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr had done their bit to define the new republic… but Turkey had only Atatürk. He was the arrow-straight dividing line between the shambling old Asiatic Ottoman Empire and modern, Western-leaning Turkey. Like any decent Founding Father he had thrashed the British, and after that he’d remade the country in his own stern image: he’d adopted the Roman alphabet and Gregorian calendar; given civil rights to women; made Turks adopt surnames; driven religion and its symbols out of public life; built a public education system from scratch; defeated enemies foreign and domestic; created a parliamentary system; promoted Western ideas of art, music, and culture. He’d also done away with the Muslim prohibition of alcohol—a mistake in his case, as he died young of cirrhosis.

  Turks revered Atatürk the way hardline Marxists revered Lenin, the way gays revered Judy Garland, the way Americans revered their pop stars up till the very second before they pissed all over them. Dagmar got that.

  What she didn’t understand was this fiendish image on the wall of the ops room. She didn’t want it there, but she didn’t know how to say it without setting off some kind of atavistic Atatürk-inspired defense mechanism and getting her Turkish comrades mad at her.

  “We brought presents!” Tuna said. He reached his big hand into a pink plastic bag and pulled out a fistful of blue and white amulets, the kind that Turks deployed against the evil eye. He, Ismet, and Rafet immediately began fixing the amulets to every vertical surface.

  Judy watched them with interest. She turned to Dagmar.

  “Do they really believe in the evil eye?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But we need all the mojo we can get.”

  “And here’s one for your office.” Ismet, handing Dagmar an amulet.

  “Thank you.”

  It was a nice one, shaped like a military medal, with the dangling eye made of heavy glass, better quality than the cheap plastic amulets available everywhere in Turkey.

  After the amulets were hung, everyone pitched in with putting the ops room together. By early evening flat-screen monitors glowed from the walls and from each of the desks, towers hummed, printers were set up in corners, and Mr. Coffee sat atop a table in the break room.

  “The rest of the team will be here tomorrow,” Lincoln said. “First briefing at oh eight hundred.”

  Dagmar raised a hand. “Will we always be using military time?” she asked.

  He smiled. “You should be thankful we’re not using Zulu Time,” he said.

  Dagmar had never heard of Zulu Time in her life.

  “I guess I should be,” she said.

  Before the flight to Cyprus, Dagmar had a series of meetings with Lincoln in California. They met at a sushi place in Studio City, where they talked about gaming and other harmless topics—the actual purpose of their meeting couldn’t be discussed in public places like restaurants.

  Chopsticks in his hand,
Lincoln lightly dipped his Crunchy Crab Roll in soy sauce. Dagmar observed the hand.

  “You don’t wear a wedding ring,” she said.

  The crab roll paused halfway to Lincoln’s lips.

  “I was married twice. Divorced both times. The job is hard on marriage.” His mouth quirked in a little smile. “Though I have to admit that, sometimes, what I do is insanely fun.”

  “Any children?”

  Lincoln, chewing, nodded. He swallowed, then took a taste of iced tea.

  “Two daughters,” he said. “Both grown, both doing well.” He looked wistful. “One of them lives in New Zealand. I see her every two or three years. The other blamed me for the divorce, and I haven’t heard from her in more than a decade.”

  Sadness brushed Dagmar’s nerves. She shook her head.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “I keep tabs on her,” Lincoln said. “Because, you know, I can— so I know that she’s all right.” His mouth took on a rueful slant. “But part of me wishes she’d run into the kind of trouble that only her dad can get her out of.”

  Dagmar’s sadness swelled. She had similar foolish fantasies herself, that Charlie or Austin or Siyed would walk through the door, surprisingly alive, and with an elaborate story that explained how it had been someone else who had died, somebody else’s corpses that Dagmar had seen, and that the whole affair had been an elaborate but necessary deception in order to thwart some unimaginable villainy…

  But of course that wouldn’t happen. Austin and Charlie wouldn’t be coming back from the falls at Reichenbach, and sometimes families came apart that shouldn’t, and sometimes families stayed together that should have come apart. And sometimes two lonely people consoled themselves with sushi and avoided talking about what had brought them together in the first place.

  After lunch Lincoln took Dagmar to the Bear Cat offices to discuss their plans for the Cyprus excursion. Lincoln had an office with an Aeron chair, a view of the Santa Monica Mountains, and framed photos of media campaigns in which he’d been involved, with Stunrunner given the pride of place, Ian Attila Gordon in his tux gazing out of the frame, his elegant little Walther automatic in his hand.

  “You get to pick your code name,” Lincoln told her.

  “Wow,” Dagmar said. “We really are living in Spy Land.”

  “Special ops.” Patiently. “We’re not after intelligence; we do things.”

  “Sorry.” Dagmar was amused. “I’ll try to remember.”

  “The computer has to approve the name,” Lincoln said. “You can’t take a name that’s already in use, and you can’t do anything obscene, but other than that, you’re reasonably free. It should be something you can remember and easily answer to.” He looked at her over his Elvis glasses. “I’m using Chatsworth.” From the handle he’d used in online games, Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

  “Does the name mean anything?” Dagmar asked. “Or did you make it up?”

  He offered a little smile. “Chatsworth was the name of a playboy character in a sixties sitcom,” he said.

  She looked at him, at the bubble hair and Elvis glasses.

  “Were you a playboy?” she asked.

  “What makes you think I’m not a playboy now?” he asked. She laughed. He considered being offended, then shrugged. “But no, it’s kind of a complicated joke. The Company was founded by a certain type of character—East Coast, Old Money, loyal Republicans—and I fit that description, sort of, at least when I was younger.” He smiled nostalgically. “I worked for Barry Goldwater alongside Hillary Clinton, do you believe it?”

  “You really knew her?”

  He waved a hand vaguely. “We met, here and there. I didn’t know her well.” He smiled. “She was too serious for me.”

  “Ah,” Dagmar said. “You were a playboy, then.”

  “I was a spoiled rich kid,” Lincoln said. “ ‘Chatsworth Osborne’ is what I’d have become if I hadn’t gone into government service, so it’s the name I use when I’m enjoying my harmless entertainments.”

  “Like overthrowing a foreign government.”

  “Like that.” Lincoln said. He cocked his head and looked at her. “Your code name?”

  Dagmar thought for a moment.

  “Briana,” she said.

  After Briana Hall, the fugitive found alone in a rented room at the beginning of Dagmar’s best-known game, and whose dilemma mirrored certain aspects of Dagmar’s past.

  “Motel Room Blues,” Lincoln said. “Very good.”

  Dagmar’s other employees were given code names as well. The problem with renaming her employees, Dagmar considered, was that she knew all of them by their real names. She was bound to slip sooner or later.

  Judy decided, logically enough, to name herself Wordz. Richard the Assassin called himself Ishikawa, after—of course—a famous ninja. The programming chief, Helmuth, decided he wanted to be called Pip. Dagmar did not think the reference was literary and decided she didn’t want to know what other inspiration might have leaked into his alcohol-tolerant brain.

  She hoped she could keep all the names straight and remember to use them in front of other people. Lincoln said to use the code names all the time, but Dagmar was sure she couldn’t.

  It was at the Bear Cat offices that Lincoln presented her with the contract, pages and pages of documents that featured, on the first page, a sum even greater than that she’d earned for Stunrunner.

  “I’ll have to show this to our lawyer,” she said.

  “He can’t see Appendix A,” Lincoln said. “He’s not cleared for that.”

  In the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Judy in the married officers’ quarters, Dagmar opened a bottle of Bass Ale and fired up her laptop. She looked up Zulu Time, which was apparently military-speak for Greenwich Mean Time, and then googled both “dervish lodge” and “Niagara Falls.”

  Naturally, Rafet’s dervish lodge had a Web page. Rafet and his comrades followed Hacı Babur Khan, a Sufi saint who had lived in Herat three centuries ago. There he founded an order of dervishes that followed his regulations for spiritual practice, among which included, according to the article, “ecstatic drumming.” “Which,” the article continued, “has resulted in occasional persecution by more orthodox Sunnis.”

  The dervishes lived in communal lodges, practiced austerity and poverty, drummed, and sang hymns written mostly by Hacı Babur Khan and his successors. The Web page maintained by the Niagara Falls lodge mentioned that it was founded in 1999, played host to a couple dozen dervishes at any one time, and offered demonstrations of drumming to the public several times each year.

  That led to a query about the Tek Organization, which Dagmar at first misspelled as “Tech.” The search engine obligingly offered a correction, and she found that a Turkish imam named Riza Tek had founded the worldwide eponymous religious organization, which had branches in at least fifty countries. The Tek Organization ran charities, schools, and broadcast stations; it owned hospitals and newspapers; it had a large publishing house that put out books, magazines on news and religion, and a very impressive-looking science magazine… none of which, alas, Dagmar could read, as they were in Arabic and every known Turkish dialect but not English.

  Turkish nationalists thought that Riza Tek was a fanatical God-inspired reactionary. Fanatical God-inspired reactionaries, the sort who belonged to or spoke for organizations that practiced suicide bombing, had a contrary view: they thought Riza Tek was a creation of the CIA.

  Any relationship between the Tek Organization and the dervish lodge in Niagara Falls remained purely speculative.

  Dagmar looked up from her laptop as Judy came into the room from the bathroom, where she’d been taking a shower. She wore a tank top that showed off her tattoo sleeves, color reaching from her wrists up her arms, over the yoke of her shoulders, and down her back. The tattoos didn’t seem to represent anything concrete but seemed inspired by physiology: they suggested, rather than depicted, muscles, bone, and a circulatory system. This gave Ju
dy’s body an unearthly aspect, as if there were some whole other form, or other creature, hidden just beneath her skin. Dagmar would have found it repellent if she hadn’t so admired the art of it.

  As Judy walked she clicked her tongue piercing against her teeth, giving her movement a rhythm track. A scent of honeysuckle soap trailed her to an armchair, where she sat, picked up her netbook, and booted it. While she waited for the first screen to appear, she looked up at Dagmar.

  “Is there some reason,” she asked, “why you moved your bed so it’s on a diagonal?”

  Dagmar’s nerves hummed a warning. She didn’t know Judy well enough to trust her with the answer.

  For that matter, she didn’t know anyone well enough.

  “It’s a luck thing,” she said vaguely.

  Judy nodded, as if that made sense.

  “I notice that you drink,” she said.

  Dagmar glanced at her Bass Ale, then looked back at Judy.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Aren’t you worried you might have inherited your father’s alcoholism gene?”

  Dagmar looked at her drink again and considered telling Judy to piss up a rope.

  “I’m not going to worry,” she said, “until I find myself drinking the same cheap crap my dad did.”

  “With my dad’s history,” Judy said, “I’m not getting high, ever.”

  Dagmar looked at the tattoos, the rows of piercings lining Judy’s ears.

  No, she thought, you don’t use; you just got addicted to pain instead. Getting jabbed thousands of times with a needle—now that wasn’t extreme, was it?

  In any case, Dagmar was not in the mood to be dictated to by some kind of tattooed Goth puritan. She picked up her ale and waved it vaguely.

  “Whatever works,” she said.

  “What do you think of Rafet?” Judy asked.